Review: The Marriage of Elinor, Margaret Oliphant (1892)

A Victorian wedding

My second foray into Mrs Oliphant has been to read the 1892 The Marriage of Elinor – a full-length novel about a woman who marries the wrong man. The wilful Elinor marries notorious gambler Philip Compton against the advice of all who love her, particularly her long-suffering mother and ever loyal (and ever ignored) distant cousin John, with the novel tracing the course of her marriage, from engagement to wedding to estrangement and reconciliation. 

For general readers: In the realistic world of Oliphant, inconvenient spouses don’t tend to die in time for the closing chapter and moral choices aren’t always clean cut so expect a novel which feels closer to life than fiction and is painstakingly concerned with the minutiae of human motivations. Elinor’s trials are entirely relatable, both as a love-struck young woman and as a mother in her forties terrified about the reaction of her teenage son to finding out his father is still living. But what really makes the novel is the strength of the characters on the periphery of her story – Elinor’s mother Mrs Dennistoun and her cousin John Tatham.

Both these characters have a rough time of it – both love Elinor and see her suffer, while Mrs Dennistoun fears being viewed as an interfering mother and mother-in-law and is left lonely at the marriage of her only daughter, and John represses his romantic feelings for his cousin and faces losing her and her son all over again as it were with the reappearance of the errant husband. And, compellingly, both never express their feelings to Elinor, giving the novel at times a real pathos and poignancy.

The familial themes the novel deals with and humanity of its characters make the novel feel highly relevant (even if marrying the wrong man today can be more easily remedied!) and what The Marriage of Elinor lacks in specific dramatic incident, it more than makes up for in terms of human interest. 

For students: There’s obviously a lot here for students looking at marital breakdown in the nineteenth century and its implications – social and financial. But there’s much more besides. Elinor’s pregnancy - another pregnancy not made all that apparent to readers until after the fact - is a key factor in the crisis of her marriage, and is worthy of closer attention.

Meanwhile Elinor’s appearance as a witness in a court case displays many of the tropes covered off in Women in the Witness Box series, with Elinor’s ability to speak an untruth truthfully skewing the trial, having a drastic impact on her domestic life at two important junctures in her life and providing the context for the final lines of the novel, when she asks John if she has done the ‘right’ thing.

Elinor’s son is also an interesting character – with references to his grammar schooling sitting neatly with the kind of educational environments described in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, which I reviewed earlier in the year.

Any student studying Victorian attitudes to marriage would do well to include The Marriage of Elinor as a lesser-known example.

Which lesser-known nineteenth-century novel should the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: P is for Pregnancy

The 2008 BBC adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891) has gone down in my family folklore. Gemma Arterton as Tess appeared in shot cradling her child (Sorrow) and my then boyfriend looked around the room in confusion, uttering the immortal words ‘where did the baby come from?’.

Naturally we all (especially my younger sister) found the question hysterical, but he had a point - the adaptation, like the novel, had skimmed over nine months of pregnancy and the moment of the child’s conception, with its corresponding questions of consent, had been suggestive, rather than overt, in its dramatisation. While in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, censorship had altered this portion of the novel, this anecdote is simply a reliving the experience of many inexperienced readers of Victorian novels for whom babies appear apparently unexpected, as if no one, even the mother, expected them beforehand.

So, for those new to picking up implied pregnancies, here are some top ‘clues’ that a child may be on its way:

1. The disappearing act: A major female character (usually recently married) seems to ‘disappear’ from the text for a while. During pregnancy, women who could afford to often led a relatively inactive lifestyle and stayed indoors. And not doing so was regarded as inappropriate, and potentially dangerous for the child (see the May family’s concern for Flora in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1871) which I reviewed recently). This means characters who played a large role in a novel during their girlhood can drop dramatically out of view when pregnant, for instance Thomasin Yeobright in Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878).

2. Delicacy: A husband shows excessive concern for his wife’s wellbeing. If a husband expresses worry over his wife completing a seemingly innocuous task (like walking somewhere or riding in a carriage), odds on, she’s pregnant (although she could also be consumptive…).

3. Condition: Anyone reference’s a female character’s ‘condition’. They don’t mean she has a headache. She’s definitely pregnant.

4. Relationships: If a female character appears to have had sex before marriage, she’ll probably become pregnant – it’s the way her actions can have consequences in plot terms (think Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3)). Likewise, using true novelistic logic, if a marriage is happy, there are likely to be children, whereas unhappy marriages will be fruitless or result in potentially morally vindictive infant death (think Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861)).

I recently finished reading George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), which was a marked contrast to this. The novel was seen as shocking at the time because of its liberality and explicitness and Esther’s pregnancy (while unmarried) comprises a large part of this. We are aware of the pregnancy from the very moment that Esther is:

‘She did not think – her mind was lost in the vague sensation of William, and it was in this death of active memory that something awoke inside her, something that seemed to her like a flutter of wings; her heart seemed to drop from its socket, and she nearly fainted away, but recovering herself she stood by the kitchen table, her arms drawn back and pressed to her sides, a death-like pallor over her face, and drops of sweat on her forehead. The truth was borne in upon her.’

We are told:

‘There was still the hope that she might be mistaken; and this hope lasted for one week, for two, but at the end of the third week it perished, and she abandoned herself in prayer.’

It’s about as close as a nineteenth-century novel comes to actively discussing a woman’s menstrual cycle.

When Esther goes into labour we are similarly allowed access to her feelings and impressions, her fear at seeing ‘the basins on the floor, the lamp on the round table, and the glint of steel instruments’ while surrounded by the noise of other women’s screams in the hospital, and her sense of shame at realising how many people will see her unclothed. This is how Esther reacts to a young doctor – ‘Oh no, not him, not him Not him, not him, he is too young! Do not let him come near me!’. She is met by laughter but her response is an internalisation of the silence surrounding pregnancy which the other novels are part of – a dramatisation of the trauma pregnancy and labour entails for those to taught to cover up and hide.

What should be ‘Q’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: The Daisy Chain; or Aspirations, Charlotte Yonge (1856)

In some ways antithetical to the sensation fiction I often write about on this blog, Yonge’s quiet, restrained and domestic novel - the story of a doctor’s eleven children – was unexpectedly compelling. Despite the distinctness if many of Yonge’s views on life and morality to my own, hers is a novel which, more than anything, rings true – in its presentation of family life, in the interiority of its characters, including the developing consciousnesses of the young, and in the dramas affecting the May family, which are the dramas of real life, where not all ‘good’ characters get rewarding ‘storybook’ endings.

For general readers: Reading The Daisy Chain was like getting to know a real family. I wasn’t blown away in the first few chapters but a hundred pages or so in and I was hooked, because the characters felt genuine, especially the children (who are often so saccharine in nineteenth-century they defy the parody of George Eliot’s ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (1856)). At times the novel frustrates by not delivering the neat conclusions fiction leads us to expect – at others it fulfils these utterly. Its subjects sound mundane if listed – parish meetings, school boy transgressions, platonic romances – but the humanity of their treatment makes for a great read.

For students: There’s a lot here. If the length of the novel is off-putting it is some comfort to know that there are particular characters, storylines and sections which will the focus of your study depending on the topic which interests you.

The third sister Ethel, who has most claim to be the novel’s protagonist, is an interesting counter study when set against Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver. She doesn’t take naturally to domestic tasks, preferring instead to keep up with her brothers in the study of Latin and Greek – but Yonge’s treatment of this issue is very different from that found in The Mill on the Floss (1860). Ethel’s role as a single female, caring for children not her own as well as her own father, is also interesting from historical perspective – since so many nineteenth-century women were in this very same position. But Yonge does not make this a tragedy. If anything it is the beautiful Flora, who follows the path of a traditional heroine, not ugly Ethel, disabled Margaret, dependable Mary or the young Blanche and Gertrude, who is the novel’s tragic figure.

Other areas for study include Yonge’s theology, close as she was to the Oxford Movement, as religion informs the novel throughout; the issue of children killed while under the care of servants (compare the take here with Braddon’s); colonial contexts and the work of missionaries, especially in the South Pacific; the role of the parish doctor (another instance of the novel as a useful intertext with Eliot) and education (with a focus on boys’ schools, girls’ lessons at home and Oxford, including an interesting plot section dealing with the Newdigate Prize).

The Daisy Chain is also an obvious second choice novel for those studying Charlotte Yonge herself, after her most famous novel – The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).

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